The lobby of a mid-sized Chicago consulting firm has the same appearance every time: glass walls, soft lighting, and a smiling receptionist. However, something seems strange when you watch a hiring debriefing upstairs. The contenders were formidable. There was no degree. Someone else was selected by the team. Anyone who has worked in corporate hiring can relate to the unstated reasoning: why take the chance?
A recent study from Harvard Business School, carried out in collaboration with the Burning Glass Institute, focuses on this quiet reluctance, and it is worth considering. Between 2014 and 2023, the study looked at over 11,000 job postings at American businesses to see if companies that eliminated college degree requirements actually followed through. The short answer is that most didn’t, which is almost unsurprising. The increase in hiring non-degree candidates was only 3.5 percentage points, and the actual impact is less than one percentage point when you consider that the change only affected a small percentage of positions in the first place. In reality, fewer than 1 in 700 new hires profited from these purported reforms.
It’s possible that some of this had nothing to do with hiring different people. Companies had every reason to show transparency during the pandemic and in the wake of popular discussions about racial justice and economic inequality. It is nearly free to rewrite a job posting. It is far more expensive to change who actually sits across the table—in terms of perceived risk, broken habits, and reevaluating evaluation systems that have been operating automatically for decades.
In the words of the Harvard study’s principal investigator, Professor Joseph Fuller, “Changing your hiring policy is, at best, the end of the beginning.” That’s a cautious way of stating that a CEO’s press release does not represent a cultural change. Hiring managers have spent their careers examining transcripts, school names, and GPAs. They are usually senior department heads rather than HR specialists. When those are removed, they are suddenly asked to evaluate a person’s potential using only the vocabulary they have ever used. It’s not comfortable. Additionally, people who are uncomfortable often go back to what they know.
There is a perception that businesses that are truly progressing should receive more attention than they currently receive. Companies like Apple, Walmart, General Motors, Target, and ExxonMobil are not tiny businesses experimenting with profit margins. The study found that companies that were sincere in their commitment to skills-based hiring saw ten percentage points more non-degree workers remain in their positions than their colleagues with degrees. The average salary increase for workers who transitioned into positions that had previously required degrees was 25%. These are not insignificant figures. Beneath the cacophony of businesses announcing change without actually implementing it, that is proof that something is working.
The math of risk in a room is what complicates this. For the hiring manager’s own performance review, reputation, and sense of accountability, the credentialed option likely still feels safer if they are selecting from four candidates and one of them lacks a degree. “They’re not interested in social experiments,” Fuller stated bluntly. To be fair, we don’t compensate them for being That is an honest acknowledgement that corporate incentive systems continue to be misguided.
In a nation where almost two-thirds of the population lacks a four-year degree and where college enrollment is steadily declining, it has never been more difficult for those who chose a different route to find employment, despite companies’ loud declarations to the contrary. At this point, the discrepancy between an organization’s stated goals and its actual actions when it matters is quantifiable and documented. The issue is not one of perception. It’s a structural one that runs deep and silently beneath the soft lighting and glass.
